A diverse group of technology leaders announce the creation of the DASH Promoters Group dedicated to driving the broad adoption of MPEG's DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP) standard.

Reacting to the dramatic growth of Internet video, DASH defines a universal delivery format to provide end users with the best-possible video experience and dynamically adapts to changing network conditions during video streaming to devices.

It incorporates all of the best elements of proprietary adaptive streaming solutions designed to solve the classic issues users see when they stream video: intermittent stalls, poor video quality under changing network conditions, and significant video start-up lag.

In addition to promoting broad adoption of DASH, the Promoters Group will focus on aligning ongoing DASH standards development, promoting the use of common profiles across industry organizations, and facilitating interoperability tests and plug-fests to demonstrate the usability and completeness of the DASH standard.

"Adobe has a long history of supporting and actively promoting industry standards and open formats," said Ashley Still, director of product management, Video Solutions at Adobe. "As the first company to support H.264 in a broad video delivery platform, we're excited to help define and advance MPEG-DASH to become a standard that is enabled across all major platforms and devices."

"Given Microsoft's role in chairing the development in ISO/MPEG of the DASH standard, we are excited to see it become available to customers," said Sudheer Sirivara, senior director – media services, on the Azure Application Platform Team at Microsoft. "We pioneered the development of adaptive streaming as a platform with Smooth Streaming, and over the last three years, we have learned a lot about doing adaptive streaming at scale across multiple customers and large online events. We look forward to bringing our learning to MPEG-DASH to help make it successful as a widely deployed standard."

The DASH Promoters Group is also working toward recommended deployment configurations for DASH, informally called DASH-264. This would enable a minimum set of DASH requirements for the industry and help enable further commercialization of mobile devices that support it.

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